Hi all!
Believe it or not, I actually had a few little Halloween things to share. The goal was to get it out on Halloween, but of course that didn’t happen. So, let’s just hold on to the Halloween fun for a few extra days and pretend that this isn’t totally irrelevant.
First of all, I am a BIG fan of Halloween. I can’t say the same about Bryan, so that put a damper on the fun this year. That, and the fact that Halloween was on a Monday and we spent the weekend at the happiest place on earth (a.k.a Bloomington, IN) for our school’s homecoming game. Since we were out of town when the parties were going on, we didn’t dress up in our planned costumes (Todd and Margo from Christmas Vacation):
We found silver suits online and I had spent a decent amount of time trying to find Evian water, but without anywhere to wear them they sat untouched in their packages. Sad, I know, but we decided to hold on to them for a “Christmas Vacation”-themed party that we will hopefully be throwing in the next couple months.
Even though we didn’t do much to actually celebrate Halloween, I did make an attempt to decorate our house a little bit. When I say “a little bit”, I’m not joking. I was seriously unprepared for my first decoration-worthy holiday in a house, so it snuck up on me. I plan to put MUCH more effort into Christmas, but here are a few things I did (goodwill finds of course) to make our house a little spookier.
First, the obvious choice. What is Halloween without pumpkins? I found these at Goodwill for $1.99 each. They were cute, but looked old and worn…not exactly the look I was going for. Nothing a little spray paint couldn’t fix though!
Using paint I already had on hand, I painted one black and one gold (NO, this is NOT an homage to Purdue…yuck) and used them to decorate around our fireplace.
They still look a little too cliché for my taste (I think I would prefer them if they were just solid pumpkins without the happy faces carved out), but they worked for this year.
I also found a little owl that I thought was so cute. Apparently owls are the big thing right now (who knew) so I feel pretty cool that I got in on the trend for cheap. Of course, he had an ugly brown color scheme going on (seen below cut in half on the right, photographed with some other painting projects to be featured in another post):
I must confess, I originally returned to my roots and painted him white:
…and then I noticed that HUGE crack going down the side. So, I gave him another coat in the same gold that I used for the pumpkin (and this mirror), and it made the defect much less noticeable.
He ended up living on our mantel too:
I think he’ll make the travel team for next fall…I’m a big fan. The last Goodwill Halloween purchase was this little sign:
I hung this on our coat closet door so it would be one of the first things anyone would see when they came to our house (and the trick-or-treaters could see it too).
And lastly, of COURSE we had jack-o-lanterns. Like, four of them…
Here’s the first three that we carved with some friends the week before Halloween. Ours was the little devil cat (appropriate because of our little guy Wrigley):
Unfortunately, we got a little excited for Halloween and carved the pumpkins a little too early. By Monday, they looked pretty decrepit, so I carved the fourth pumpkin. I found a tip on Pinterest that if you dump in one of those silica (?) packets (I got mine out of a shoe box), it makes the pumpkin last longer.
It’s only been a couple of days so I can’t speak to the effectiveness of this method, but here’s what it looked like on Halloween. Pretty spooky, right?
Happy (belated) Halloween!
xox, katie
